Panel discussion: Reframing Conceptions of Success in Higher Education

Greig Krull, Willem Conradie, Danie de Klerk, Laura Dison, Fiona MacAlister, Shirra Moch, and Kershree Padayachee

The teaching and learning context at Wits University has been fundamentally altered by the Covid-19 pandemic. A key challenge during this period has been how to support staff and students optimally in transitioning to a new way of teaching and learning, while finding ways to overcome resistance to Emergency Remote Teaching and Learning (ERTL). One of the emerging tensions over the past year and a half has been disparate conceptions of success within the institution and the higher education sector more broadly and how to better understand performance and student experiences of learning. This critical dialogue seeks to discuss prevailing views of success during this time for students, for lecturers and for teaching and learning support staff, and to interrogate these conceptions and narratives to help educators make thoughtful judgments about how to improve students’ learning experiences. The aim of this critical dialogue session is to explore the past year of teaching and learning in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and the emerging tensions around different conceptions of success in a research-intensive university context. The panel consists of members of Teaching and Learning Units from four different faculties. The dialogue aims to explore how the dominant notions of success (and measures of success) were disrupted in 2020, and implications of this disruption for the roles, identities and workload expectations for students, lecturers and teaching and learning support staff. Each member will share their own personal stories through reflections of critical moments in the last year that speak to these conceptions of student and teaching success. The value of this critical dialogue is that different faculties are represented, and each panel member has a different role when it comes to supporting teaching and learning. It contributes towards a much-needed reconceptualisation of ‘success’ and how to inform our critical judgments about online teaching in a context of innovation and transformation in higher education.

Type of Contribution

Critical dialogue